Friday, December 8, 2017

For years I have been amazed how software is still complex to write. In 1980 when I worked with DBase2 I could open a file with 1 statement (effectively "Open file" ). The latest iteration of .net has multiple convoluted lines of code attached to libraries that do the same thing. I saw a prototype programming environment from IBM in 1980 that used visual objects to describe the system and processes (a 5th Generation Language) then built the software. However, nearly 40 years code such as .net looks more like a foreign language than anything resembling a real word process ... where have we gone wrong??????

.. and this has led to ...

"Computing is fundamentally invisible," Gerard Berry said in his talk. "When your tires are flat, you look at your tires, they are flat. When your software is broken, you look at your software, you see nothing."